Revenge: behavioral and emotional consequences

Abstract

This commentary discusses dozens of ecologically powerful social-psychological experiments from the1960s and 1970s, which are highly relevant especially for predicting the consequences of revenge. McCullough et al. omitted this work – perhaps because of its misclassification as “catharsis” research. The findings are readily accommodated by Konecˇ ni’s anger-aggression bidirectional-causation (AABC) model and can be usefully incorporated in an adaptationist view of revenge.